


A Devil's Past

by Tal



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Childhood, Cold War, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tal/pseuds/Tal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A take on Hannibal’s past for the TV series, as the past described in Hannibal Rises would be out of date for it. Title might change.</p><p>Some killers are born, some are created, but the Devil has always just been there.</p><p>Chapter one – An introduction: “Most of the rooms of his palace are bleak. They reflect the outside world.” A boy, five years of age, raised in Lithuania in the days of the Cold War.<br/>Chapter two - A magnifying glass: "He’s five-and-a-half when his mother gives birth to a baby girl. "</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An introduction

Most of the rooms of his palace are bleak. They reflect the outside world, where he lives, in a bleak house on a bleak street, in a bleak city in a bleak country.

They’re calling it the ‘cold war', and though the meaning is purely figurative, he feels it. It’s strange that he should feel it, because he’s only five years of age and he’s never known a different world to this one, but he does notice it. It’s like there is a damp grey cloth over the city; the buildings and its people are drab and cold. He knows it's not supposed to be like this. He knows is more than this bleakness somewhere.

There is joy, of course, but it seems to him the joy of desperation. A façade of smiles and laughter, attempts at self-protection. He sees his neighbours laugh, but their eyes do not meet the tugging of the corners of their mouths and the roars of laughter from their throats. They don’t feel their laughter, they merely use it to hide the truth.

He has asked them about the falseness of their smiles in the past, but he has only been met with lies. Some of them believe these fabrications themselves. They have created the world around them to suit their bleak fates.

It suits him, he thinks, this falseness of cheer. He has never had cause for a true smile. He gathers he understands what it must be like to smile, to experience true joy, true happiness, but he has never felt it, as such. They seem, to him, abstract concepts that can be studied, but never lived. Their cheerful disguises suit him well; when _he_ smiles it too is a disguise.

He knows there is truth and emotion under the lies. He has seen his mother cry when she thought she was alone, he’s seen anger and hate in the eyes of men who have since vanished. He's seen it, behind closed doors, when no one is looking – the surfacing of truth, when sadness rises and bile is spewed. This too suits him. He has never been angry himself. He has never cried. The privacy of these emotions ensures he doesn't stand out.

In this bleak world, he is fortunate, he supposes, because his family still possesses some wealth and manages to maintain a higher standard of life than most of his neighbours. His parents don’t spend their money abundantly (that’s impossible in this country), but he is cared for and he wants for nothing.

Most of the money his family owns is used for small favours and charity to the poorest in the city. He’s never sure if it’s out of kindness or to buy protection, afraid that someone might report them and their wealth, position and influence. What he does know, is that it buys the neighbour’s respect for the family. They are appreciated and they are left alone. That, he supposes, is the desired effect and he is glad for it.

No one talks about life before the war. The past does not exist in this country. There is only the bleak now. The only man who has ever spoken (dared speak) to him about life beyond, is his teacher.

His teacher, Andras Grauza, is not a real teacher. His real teachers have never taught him anything he didn’t know already. Grauza, on the other hand, teaches him everything he could ever think of and more.

The middle-aged man has been the owner of the bookshop for years, ever since his research job was terminated, quite suddenly, with the vanishing of the leading professor. He owns, in fact, two book shops. One, state-approved and thoroughly decent, sells only approved papers and vetted books. The other, hidden away in a basement, is a garden of forbidden fruit, with books from around the world, with true knowledge, with culture and beauty. The little boy is amazed by the basement and spends most of his time there.

Everything the boy knows about the world beyond this one, about history, culture and the world, he has learned through Grauza and his books. The man has a seemingly infinite mind and loves to share with the little boy, who soaks up knowledge like a sponge.

Not much of his family’s history is left, but what he knows, he has learned from Grauza’s infallible memory. He knows he comes from a good family, from wealth and nobility. He has seen the castle his family owned, and knows that his grandfather was a Catholic count. The castle, now nothing but a ruin, was raided during the war, and his father had only barely managed to survive. He was the last of the line. Everyone else died.

Most of the family’s possessions, he learned, vanished during that war, into the hands of the enemy. That which remained had to be hidden carefully to avoid being taken away by the victors of the war. He has only lived for five years, but he realizes already that there is not so much difference between enemy and victor. Either way his family has lost. It seems the entire country has lost. That’s why the outside world is bleak. That’s why his palace is bleak.

His palace is a mental palace, a memorization technique, that Grauza taught him when he first realized the boy’s keen mind. The purpose is to give any knowledge he gains a place in his mind.

It’s hard, he finds to reproduce colour the walls of his mental palace, to create a colourful world in which to find his memories. It’s hard to find music to be able to find his way, and colour to be able to see what he has found. Bleak information on bleak walls, he finds, is hard to remember.

When he tells his teacher, the old man laughs and tells him it’s a metaphorical palace, that it can be any type of building and in any colour. But he wants it to be a palace and he wants it to be filled with beautiful colour, pleasing sounds and nice smells. He wants it to be the beauty that the outside world cannot provide.

So he reads and he listens to his teacher, and he listens to recordings, and he reads. He reads about his country and the culture of his people and it seems a different world, entirely parallel to the world he inhabits. There are colours between the lines of the pages, and smells he thinks he should know, but he’s never smelled before.

He uses these colours to colour his walls, and music and smells to find his way through his palace. 


	2. A magnifying glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He’s five-and-a-half when his mother gives birth to a baby girl. "

He’s five-and-a-half when his mother gives birth to a baby girl. She raises it carefully over the bed for the young boy to see. It’s nothing but a tiny bundle of flesh; but everything is in place in miniature version. Hannibal has learned everything there is to know about human reproduction, embryonic and foetal development and the birth of new life, but this is the first time he sees it up close. This is new life, life that didn’t exist yesterday, but is now breathing and crying and helpless. The helplessness astonishes him. It can do nothing by itself. It needs to be fed, nurtured, cared for. It can’t consciously expect anything - inherently and entirely reliant on its parents. Hannibal is fascinated by it. 

He stretches out his arms to receive it, but his mother shakes her head. She gives him a kiss on top of his head instead. “When she’s a little older, you’ll get to hold her.” He doesn’t mind this and folds his arms behind his back to examine it without touching it, like one might a painting or sculpture. His mother smiles at him and he smiles back at her. 

He wants, he finds, more than anything, to protect it, to make sure it can survive and thrive in this world. To guide it, if he can. To teach it, as Grauza is teaching him.  

He smiles because this must be a cause for a true smile. This must be what a smile feels like. 

His mother calls it Mischa, and just like that, it becomes a person, a personality, sentient life. ‘It’ becomes ‘she’. It’s a great responsibility for someone so young, Hannibal thinks; the responsibility to develop, to grow, to understand - and he wants to help her in whichever way he can. He’s not allowed to hold her, because he is too young still, but he’s allowed to look at her in her cot, to give her toys and to play with her. He will do what he can.

Communication, he quickly learns, is impossible, but he also knows it requires only a little patience. She will grow older and he will teach her about colour and smells and beauty and she will live outside of this bleak place, in a beautiful palace of her own making, where they will both be happy. He knows that that is the best way to protect her against the tedium and bleakness of the world. 

Grauza is pleased with this keenness. The young boy doesn’t form attachments very easily, and it’s a joy to watch him be so protective over his little sister. It’s a kind of responsibility that cannot be taught in a classroom, or amidst books in a bookshop’s basement, and Grauza is pleased that Hannibal found it on his own. 

In addition, the little girl feeds Hannibal’s keen interest for everything. With great ferocity he learns about art, history, biology, chemistry, physics; there is not a topic he’s not intrigued by. Grauza teaches him what he can and the boy soaks it up like a sponge. 

The boy possesses such an astonishing brain, that Grauza sometimes forget that he is but six years of age. They speak on equal terms, discuss topics he might discuss with men and women his own age. 

It’s therefore sometimes a bit of a surprise to see the boy act his own age. It’s understandable, of course, that he still sees the world through a child’s eyes. And it's a good thing, Grauza reflects. Boys need to be allowed to be boys. 

So when Hannibal finds the section horror stories in English, Grauza does not discard them as inferior literature. The boy should read what he enjoys to read. Just because the boy has a superior mind, it does not mean he should be confined to enjoy only that which an adult would enjoy. Like any boy, he loves war and horror, and it ought to be allowed. If he wants to go out on the streets and fight school boys with make-believe weapons, he should do so. If he wants to read about Dracula and demons and monsters, Grauza will let him. He _is_ , after all, just a boy.  


And like any boy, he gets into scrapes.

“Boy. Boy!” Grauza laments, arms extended to receive him, when Hannibal comes into the shop, with a bloody lip. “What did you do?”

“I fought with another boy,” the boy helpfully supplies. “I wanted to borrow his magnifying glass, but he wouldn’t let me have it.” Hannibal needed that magnifying glass. He wanted to observe, up close, the workings of his own hand, to see the cells that composed it, how the muscles moved and how the veins travelled.

“Now then, let’s take a look at that face.” The boy sits down in front of him to be cared for. Grauza cleans the blood from his lip with a little damp cloth. When he sees no guilt on the boy’s face, and smiles a bit. Clearly Hannibal does not yet understand the rules of property, which perhaps is not so strange for a boy of his age, with such a mind. Priorities and life lessons get mixed up. “You must understand that he might have wanted that magnifying glass himself. It was his, after all. You can’t simply take what you wish, when you wish it. Promise me you'll give it back to the boy.”

Hannibal nods. The magnifying glass is in his pocket. He needs it. He wants it and he will put it to far better use than the other boy would. Burning ants? Whatever can be the point of that? His own plans for it are superior, and therefore more deserving of the manifying glass. It follows that he should have it.

He will not give it back. The next time he gets into a fight, he will lie about it to avoid being scolded. 


End file.
